Publicaciones científicas

Spatially resolved tissue imaging to analyze the tumor immune microenvironment: beyond cell-type densities

31-may-2024 | Revista: Journal of Immunotherapy Cancer

Alvaro Lopez Janeiro  1   2 , Eduardo Miraval Wong  2 , Daniel Jiménez-Sánchez  3 , Carlos Ortiz de Solorzano  4 , Maria D Lozano  1   2   5 , Alvaro Teijeira  1   5   6 , Kurt A Schalper  7 , Ignacio Melero  1   5   6   8 , Carlos E De Andrea  9   2   5   10


Introduction: The tissue immune microenvironment is associated with key aspects of tumor biology. The interaction between the immune system and cancer cells has predictive and prognostic potential across different tumor types. Spatially resolved tissue-based technologies allowed researchers to simultaneously quantify different immune populations in tumor samples. However, bare quantification fails to harness the spatial nature of tissue-based technologies. Tumor-immune interactions are associated with specific spatial patterns that can be measured. In recent years, several computational tools have been developed to increase our understanding of these spatial patterns.

Topics covered: In this review, we cover standard techniques as well as new advances in the field of spatial analysis of the immune microenvironment. We focused on marker quantification, spatial intratumor heterogeneity analysis, cell‒cell spatial interaction studies and neighborhood analyses.

CITA DEL ARTÍCULO  J Immunother Cancer. 2024 May 31;12(5):e008589. doi: 10.1136/jitc-2023-008589